1: In Adobe Photoshop: Crop your photo as you would like it on the icon down to the size of 100x100 pixels. I used a personal photo of my adorble son, Kai, as an example

2: Sharpen once or twice

3: I like to brighten the photo a bit by using Hardlight, do this by duplucating your photo base once, and setting the setting to highlight. I used about 60% opacity for my photo. You can do this less or more depending on the lightness or boldness of your photo base.

4: Next comes the fun part, cutting out the image you want to use on your icon. To do this, set your main color to Black. Then on the bottom of your tool bar, hit the "mask" button. Then use your paint brush with a round brush tool to color everything YOU DO NOT WANT IN THE ICON! Leaving just the image uncolored. The background should turn red when you do this, that is how you know it is working!


5: Next, click on the "unmask" button. This will make the dancing ants apear around your image. (see photo)


6: Open the icon texture you wish to use. Mine is by the lovely, Ashley, of Spinmearound.net


7: Copy your icon image (CTL C) and then go to your icon texture , go to layer and open a new layer.


8: Then paste your icon image (photo) as a new layer onto the texture. (CTL V).


9: Next, we are gonna add some color to the icon. Go to layer again, and add a new layer. Now go to layer again, and go down to fill layer. Fill the layer with a solid color or gradient of your chocie.


10: Set this colored layer to COLOR 66% opacity.

This is what I got, pretty huh?

11: Now comes the text. Using the eye dropper tool, select a color from the background of your icon. Type the text you wish to use.


12: Now comes the text effects.

13: First for a 1px stroke in the same colour as the font.


14: Then Bevel and Emboss, in these settings


15: Now for Inner Glow.


16: Next comes Outer Glow


17: Lastly, the drop shadow! (you may set the color on the shadow to a darker version of the text color, yet I use just black a lot also!)


18: Set your text layer to Lighten. This will help you get the text to look like it blends in with your icon. Pretty.. pretty.


19: I am lazy, so I normally duplicate that layer.. change the font to a pixel font (pixies, pixel, 04b_03) and make my small pixeled text. (you can also use this step to make hearts, so forth)


20: There you go, a perfect icon! .. you can add borders.. animation and so forth now!


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